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Title: Poles and Italians then, Mexicans Now? Immigrant-to-Native Wage Ratios, 1910 and 1940
Citation Type: Working Paper
Publication Year: 2004
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Abstract: A dominant concern regarding the contemporary immigration to the United States involves immigrants who arrive with work-related skills far below those of typical U. S. workers; will such immigrants manage to improve upon their conditions and will they be able to help their children reach still better conditions? The farther behind the immigrant is from the typical U.S. worker at the time of immigration, the harder this process is likely to be. In earlier periods of American history, we know that such immigrant catch-up did occur; is the present like the past? The most relevant historical example concerns the last great wave of immigration, roughly 18901920 during which southern, central, and eastern Europeans from ethnic stocks that had been little known in the United States before that time, immigrated in great numbers to a modern, industrial, society. Yet by about 1980, no appreciable differences remained between the socioeconomic positions of the descendants of that immigration and the descendants of much earlier arrivals to the United States (Lieberson and Waters 1988). Following Stanley Lieberson (1980), I refer to these southern, central, and eastern Europeans as SCE immigrants...
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Authors: Perlmann, Joel
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Publication Number: 343
Institution: Bard College
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Publisher Location: Annandale-on-Hudson, New York
Data Collections: IPUMS USA
Topics: Migration and Immigration, Poverty and Welfare, Race and Ethnicity
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